Death Counter theories

[ChillestBro]

So I have been messing around so far in the game, enjoying the game myself since I knew it wouldn't be perfect and realistically just wanted a modern STALKER to play, and I have noticed something.

So I know from previous games that your ending could be changed depending on how many times you had died on your save, so the counter that appears at the death screen isn't surprising. Rather what is surprising to me is, regardless of what "save slot" the current run is, or how many times you have or have not died in your current run, the counter continues to count deaths as if it will never stop.

I still take it that this mechanic is used for the ending somehow, but any ideas why it doesn't reset?

I've read that "multiplayer" is going to be a thing, so it could have some tie-in to the online aspects, idk.

[Hasturilla]

I did some testing. I deleted a save file after plopping into the lake during the prologue. It seemed to keep the deaths. After deleting all saves and then quitting out of the game entirely, it seemed to loose all deaths and was at 1 death when tasting the radioactive water again. Hard to say what the intent is yet, but hopefully that helps if you desire to reset fully.

[dichebach]

Originally posted by Hasturilla:

I did some testing. I deleted a save file after plopping into the lake during the prologue. It seemed to keep the deaths. After deleting all saves and then quitting out of the game entirely, it seemed to loose all deaths and was at 1 death when tasting the radioactive water again. Hard to say what the intent is yet, but hopefully that helps if you desire to reset fully.

In the interest of scientific confirmation, I repeated your tests.
1. Played a bit and died a total of four times.
2. Deleted all saves and restarted (without exiting game).
5. Followed your lead and jumped in the lake = 5 deaths.
6. Deleted the saves, and exited to desktop.
7. Rebooted game, started new campaign, and repeated the lake test = 1 death.

Your observations are confirmed!

if you want to try for a zero deaths (or a very low deaths) completion, whenever you die, you must delete all saves, exit the game, and literally start over from scratch.

While I will not say that I have thought it through thoroughly and have not done all the testing necessary to be certain, I suspect that the intent here is to make it damn near impossible (at least without editing save files) to "cheat" to a true zero deaths campaign. I won't speculate about the mechanisms for it, there would seem to be many different ways to implement it this way. But based on the fact that you must delete all saves, then exit the game to get back to a zero death count, it would seem it is intentional.